As his presidency progresses, Obama can't hide his real feelings toward Israel, the tyrannical thugs of the world, and the free-market system.
Barack Obama’s presidency marks a revolutionary change in America’s relations with the Middle East. This is not an accident, and it is not the consequence of reckless Israeli behavior.
In his two autobiographical books, Obama appears as a postmodern, left-of-center intellectual. The books were taken in the media at face value, and although they contain some insights into his progressive agenda, the depth of Obama’s connections to neo-Marxist ideologues was only touched upon in passing. The media left it at that, and when he was campaigning, the mainstream media refused to research these ideological alliances.
As a community organizer, Barack Obama was heavily influenced by the theories of Saul Alinsky, who was a non-partisan neo-Marxist focused on the non-violent transformation of civil society. In Germany, a similar model was called der Marsch durch die Institutionen — “the long journey through the institutions.”
Alinsky’s most important work is Rules for Radicals, published in 1971, a year before his death. Its central theme is the question of how to organize individuals into revolutionary masses and gain control of society. The opening lines of Rules for Radicals are:
What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.
Barack Obama is the student Alinsky could only have dreamed of tutoring.
Smoothly, Obama executed Alinsky’s strategy: look and sound like a moderate member of civil society, but at the same time prepare silently for a structural transformation. Obama knew he should run as an African-American candidate, as a law professor, as a respectable left-of-center member of the mainstream establishment, but essentially he was an Alinsky candidate all the way.
In October 2008, it was revealed that the Los Angeles Times had a video which seemed to show Barack Obama at an event with the radical anti-Israel Palestinian Rashid Khalidi. But the newspaper refused to make the video’s content public, supposedly to protect its source. Think about this for a moment. It is doubtful whether the newspaper would have made the same defense if the presidential candidate had been a conservative. The protection of the individual source would have been pushed aside for the argument that the public had to be informed of a matter of urgent national interest.
In this case, candidate Obama had to be protected. Why? If Obama had simply expressed himself neutrally or the event was just a friend’s party for Rashid Khalidi, the Times would have happily distributed the video. Almost certainly, the explanation for the secrecy with which the Times has handled the tape can only lie in its sensitive content. Otherwise, the Times’ careful behavior is nothing but inexplicable. What could that video contain? There is no need to guess. It can only be anti-Israel remarks made by Obama at a party of a close, radical, Palestinian friend.
Rashid Khalidi is one of the central figures in America’s left-wing, anti-Israel academy. The Khalidis and the Obamas shared the same circle of radical intellectual friends in Chicago, among whom the former terrorists William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were prominent members. Barack and Rashid had a solid friendship, being employed as professors at the University of Chicago together. They regularly met for meals with wives and kids.
But when Obama started running for president, he had to cut off or even deny his life as an Alinsky radical (he pretended to know Ayers only in passing as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood“), and the media cooperated, ignoring Obama’s life as an ideologue and radical professor. The possibility that an African-American could become president was more important than collecting information about his politics, his beliefs, his ideas, his connections, and his friendships. Alinsky couldn’t have planned it better.
Not only is the the Los Angeles Times video still under lock and key at the newspaper, we also have no clue what Obama has written in his student papers, as they are also locked away.
We do know what his spiritual mentor, Jeremiah Wright, told him during the twenty years that the Obamas were members of Wright’s congregation. Wright married Barack and Michele and baptized their children. Wright is a screaming anti-American and anti-Semitic racist, a successful exploiter of “black rage” who earned a small fortune with his radical diatribes.
Why would a decent mainstream law professor grace this extremely provocative and anti-Semitic preacher with his presence? How can you ally yourself for twenty years with such a man and get away with it? Well, Obama and his campaign advisors showed their brilliance; in order to silence the threat of his former pastor — an uncontrolled man who had to be neutralized – Obama gave his “race speech” in March 2008. In it, he turned the threat of his alliance to Wright into an accentuation of his candidacy as an African-American. And the media complied.
Harry Reid was right: “He [Reid] was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama — a ‘light-skinned’ African American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,’ as he said privately. Reid was convinced, in fact, that Obama’s race would help him more than hurt him in a bid for the Democratic nomination,” Mark Halperin and John Heilemann write in Game Change.
The true character of the candidate that the American public elected was hidden from scrutiny by smooth-marketing geniuses like David Axelrod, who was able to create a ring of safety around Obama based on the deadly weapon the Obama team could point at his critics: the race card. This is a weapon that, at the moment, is widely used.
During the campaign, Obama’s life in Chicago as a member of the radical left was left mainly untouched by the American media. America desperately needed a bipartisan black president. Instead, it elected a neo-socialist Alinskyite.
Obama masterfully hid his true colors when running for office, but they are slowly reappearing in his policies. He is soft on leftist dictators, soft on Islamic tyrannies, and radically negative toward big companies, which he openly denounces. He recently verbally trashed the complete health insurance industry in America in a violent speech worthy of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Obama never shed his radical convictions when he entered the White House, but he knows he has to be careful and pretend he is a moderate left-of-center politician, totally at ease with the system of capitalistic civil society. But he, as an historic figure, now can transform the economic and social fabric of the leading nation on earth from within.
To understand Obama’s ideas about Israel and the Palestinians, one should understand the ideas of his close friend Rashid Khalidi. According to Khalidi, Israel is “a state that exists today at the expense of the Palestinians.” Israel “fails to meet the most important requirement: justice.” In an interview in 2000, when he and Obama could still meet freely and exchange ideas about racism, colonialism, and imperialism over dinner, Khalidi said that Israel was a “racist” state, a state that was “basically an apartheid system in creation.”
Obama is getting the assistance of left-wing Jews, for whom the Jewish state is a shameful reminder of their tribal ghetto-ancestry, of dancing Chassidim, and of outdated religious-colonialist ideas over promised lands that cause innocent Arab Muslims to suffer and to blow themselves up.
This is the present situation. It doesn’t make sense to hide the truth. The president of the United States despises Israel. Obama has constructed one of history’s most impressive political careers while hiding his true convictions. But these are now beginning to show in his denial of Palestinian brutality, Iranian apocalyptic ambitions, Chinese devastation of Tibet, the liberating and emancipating qualities of the free market, and Israel’s right to defend itself.
If Obama is Israel’s best friend, it is time for the Jewish state to look for others.
Leon de Winter is a novelist and columnist for Elsevier Magazine in the Netherlands. His last novel, The Right of Return is a thriller set in Tel Aviv in 2024. He presently lives in Los Angeles.
Note ... Would someone please forward a copy of this article to PM Netanyahu. Know your enemy, dear Israel. After all I have read about Bibi, I am sure he is well aware of the fact that Obama, the Emperor with No Clothes, is not who he says he is, .... or thinks he is; America is waking up and fighting back, and we pray it is not too late! Meanwhile, Israel, do not turn your back on Obama. Bee Sting
